Kendriya Vidyalaya is celebrated Sanskrit Saptah from 16.08.2016 to 22.08.2016

How to transfer across universities

How to transfer across universities
Have you spent a year or two at a college that still just does not feel like it was the right choice? If so, you could consider a campus transfer. A transfer can mean changing the institution you’ve been attending or transferring colleges within the same university.

The transfer application process is slightly different from fresh applicants, who have recently completed Class 12. The overall acceptance rate for transfer applicants is also lower due to space limitations and academic requirements.

Among domestic students in the US, a common transfer path from a two-year community college to four-year degree granting universities, is through a 2+2 structure. Community colleges offer associates degrees from where students can complete their core requirements with a smaller financial burden and develop a strong academic profile for transferring to a fouryear, bachelor’s degree granting college for the final two years.

When evaluating transfer applicants, colleges are interested in the students’ grades at their current college. They often do not require standardised testing (ACT/SAT) or high school academic records. However like first-year applicants, students are expected to write personal essays, and submit résumés, grades and recommendations.

Not all universities accept transfer students, therefore it is important to find out what possibilities exist early on. Each university has a different policy on transferring credits and accepting students as well. For example, courses taken in the first year may or may not be accepted by some universities for their credit requirements. This may mean unnecessarily repeating courses or potentially extending your course of study. Also transfer requirements and acceptance rates can differ between different colleges in the same university. For example, a transfer from NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences into NYU’s School of Education (Steinhardt) versus its School of business (Stern) differs in its expectations and overall rate of acceptance.

Students at US colleges who decide to change majors within the college should do so within the first two years so there is enough time to finish all the requirements. Do not wait too long to settle on a major (3rd or 4th year is too late) otherwise you may not have enough time to finish credits. This can mean having to take summer school classes or maybe even add a semester and graduate later than your peers. Out of all the types of transfers, changing majors is the easiest and can be done from within the institution — no external records should be required.

All in all, while transferring colleges is common enough, it would not be advised unless you are really unhappy with your current institution. Some questions to ask yourself if you are considering a transfer:

Can I meet my goals at this college? Have I tried exploring ways to make my experience better? For example, you could join extra-curricular student groups (college experience doesn’t have to be only about academics) Can I be successful enough here to meet my postgraduate goals (such as a desired job or master’s programme)?

If your answers to these question still lead you to seek a transfer to another college then keep the following in mind:

1. US college transfer deadlines are typically in the beginning of the year, around February to April. Check each college deadline carefully.

2. Research the college well, and make sure it is the right fit for you. If there are only a handful of transfer seats available, you need to convince the admissions committee that you are certain this is the right choice for you.

3. Do not be negative about your current or past institutions. Instead emphasise how they prepared you to take the next step to a different college. The best strategy is to make the most of where you are and take advantage of opportunities that can enhance and supplement your academic experience. Often students assume they can transfer into a better college after completing a year or two at their current institutions. This is not necessarily the case unless they have really excelled and shown significant potential in their current college. Transfer requires significant logistical preparation as well as social and emotional changes –nothing to be entered into lightly.

Source | Hindustan Times | 3 August 2016

How to align corporate learning with artificial intelligence

How to align corporate learning with artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) which was once upon a time largely implemented in video games and select complex advanced scientific and industrial applications, has now invaded the corporate world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) which was once upon a time largely implemented in video games and select complex advanced scientific and industrial applications, has now invaded the corporate world. It is befriended by different functions of the business as an aid for decision making, simulating scenarios and in gaining new knowledge and insights about various facets of business on a scale and magnitude never before experienced by organisations. Robots which were considered very complex to build and were mostly positioned in large manufacturing companies have become significantly more impactful powered by AI and are also able to socialise recognising human body and voice. Hence every business, small or large, is beginning to think of the impact AI could make in enhancing customer experience, innovating their products and offerings with the help of deep analytics, reducing costs and losses by avoiding potential pitfalls in taking smarter decisions. It is also time to consider the role AI could play in the talent development function and make learning and development of professionals more exciting and impactful.

The biggest value add AI could bring to corporate learning is better understanding of learners, their learning styles and their evolving learning needs. AI may replace trainers in some cases fully or partially and by following the learning patterns of the trainees, will empower the training managers to come up with customised and varied offerings. Often times, learners do not wish to be exposed of their weaknesses and therefore may be reluctant to learn. AI powered environment facilitates learning through trial and error methods and encourages the learners to experiment without fear or being intimidated.

AI systems could provide expertise and answer queries intelligently and through this process become smarter and more intelligent with every transaction thus slowly becoming a synergistic companion for the learner as well as the trainer whose role over a period of time will become that of a facilitator. AI systems could even take on the role of grading, evaluating the students and providing feedback from time to time. At times, the learning content and pedagogy may not be just right because of which learners struggle with their grades and the learning outcomes may not be satisfactory. AI systems enable large organisations to study these patterns to arrive at the exact course corrections that are required to be made to bridge such gaps and thus make learning purposeful. They bring together the vast amounts of data about individual learning, social contexts, learning contexts and personal interests and makes it possible to derive insights from interactions to make learning adaptive as well as contextual.

When knowledge is served up to the employees as required and contextualised, it becomes much more valuable than when it is static and has the same flavour at all times to everyone. Contextual support at the time of addressing a customer query or resolving a problem at customer site not only enables the executive to be productive and tap into the knowledge just in time, the organisation knowledge repository also constantly grows in this process and becomes more intelligent over a period of time.

The examples of Siri, Cortana, Deep Mind acquired by Google and driver less cars are well known, all of which highlight the potential of machine learning unleashed by AI systems applied in different ways. IBM’s Watson is a classic example of the deep commitment to ongoing learning—which has seen brilliant results in a variety of fields such as oncology, travel, law and finance. The device can perform text mining and complex analytics on huge volumes of unstructured data and serve up knowledge that we are seeking. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company invested by Tesla founder Elon Musk is aiming to build a new model of free training “gym” for computer programmers. Known as OpenAI Gym, it’s an open source tool to get developers around the world to train computer systems in better ways to learn and develop more complex reasoning systems.

Training managers motivated by the potential of AI interventions in the talent development process could start by identifying a specific area where a pilot could commence. With the help of a relevant AI tool and ongoing analytics, it would be possible to assess the progress the learning programme makes. While the possibilities are exciting, there has to be a commitment from the top to accord importance for AI powered learning and continuous engagement with the view to making processes intelligent. Rules would have to be defined, domain expertise needs to be formulated and control structures require to be outlined in order to make the programme robust.

The measure of success in such an exercise is not just the short term outcome, but the impact it is capable of creating on an ongoing basis. In addition, the longer term intelligence that the tool acquires helps in coaching and providing expertise that surpasses the impact traditional training programmes and trainers can deliver.

The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company

Source | http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/tech/how-to-align-corporate-learning-with-artificial-intelligence/334427/

Cultural integration must be dealt with the same seriousness as technological or digital integration

Cultural integration must be dealt with the same seriousness as technological or digital integration
The last decade saw the evolution in cross-border trade. As communications technology breaks down barriers, MNCs will continue to expand their footprint. This has facilitated the movement of global talent, with most MNCs encouraging cultural diversity. For HR professionals, attracting global resources would mean staying abreast with the evolving talent needs and devising strategies to not just attract, but also retain a diverse talent pool.

As business leaders, the question we need to ask ourselves is are we equipped to handle a multi-cultural workforce? Capability building is a part of the HR tapestry in any organisation. We need to encourage employees to be curious about cultural nuances and work towards establishing a ‘cultural quotient’. The cross-cultural flow of talent first started with the proliferation of the IT industry as talent moved across the country. That has now extended beyond national borders, making the whole process of inculturation even more critical.

For our business to thrive, we need people. To ensure that our workforce can deliver to its optimum potential, we need to invest in an environment that enables them to flourish. This can’t happen through makeshift solutions.

Often, people confuse orientation sessions with actual cultural induction. Cultural integration must be dealt with the same seriousness as technological or digital integration. At times, it is the smallest of efforts that can make people feel welcome. Living on foreign shores makes people crave for home and even a simple initiative like subscribing to a newspaper or magazine from various nationalities reassures people that they are being taken care of. Team lunches with global cuisines can serve as a trigger to cultural conversations. It is also a good idea to work towards an ecosystem that is culture agnostic. In fact, we make a conscious effort to invest in creating opportunities for employees to travel and expose them to international offices.

The process requires engagement of various stakeholders. HR teams will have to educate managers on how to leverage the presence of global colleagues while ensuring that cultural nuances in terms of interpersonal relations are not misinterpreted. Fostering a collaborative culture could be a great step in this direction where the company’s values and commitment to diversity is communicated across geographies.

The advantages of a multicultural atmosphere are plenty. Diversity of any kind, be it skills and experiences, linguistic, grassroots exposure, helps organisations service their consumers and clients better. Since people come from different backgrounds, they bring with them a variety of perspectives and this helps in solving problems creatively. A heterogeneous mix of people can also add value while making strategic decisions and eventually in improved execution, which, in turn, has a positive impact on productivity as well as growth.

To enable successful management of diversity, organisations must go beyond training the HR team and ensure that the messaging trickles down to every individual. It is important to get a sense of how employees deal with it. Simple steps like exposing employees to short-term assignments across geographical locations, making them work on global projects or encouraging them to learn the basics of a new language can all add up to the goal of creating a workforce that has truly imbibed the multicultural spirit.

There is no denying that a multicultural workforce is here to stay. Besides bringing together a diverse pool of talent, it gives organisations competitive edge. An inclusive work culture not only helps in retaining talent, but also attracts new talent. Organisations that have employees from different cultural backgrounds, more often than not, offer a broader range of services. All of this leads to a healthy working environment.

Source | http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/jobs/in-a-globalised-workforce-why-cultural-integration-is-as-crucial-as-digital-integration/334363/

Four Ways to Keep Students' Attention

Four Ways to Keep Students' Attention
Creating classroom experiences that grab and hold students' interest is not only good teaching, it's good science, writes Karen Costa.

Want to learn the art of attention from an expert? Visit a kindergarten classroom. Clap-clap-clapclapclap! The sharp, intentional and unexpected rhythm rang out through the library while I was volunteering with my son’s class. And then, a retort from the now-quiet children. Clap-clap-clapclapclap! The children’s eyes settled on their teacher; the jubilant conversations had ceased. Attention was ready to be paid.

Consider this common expression: Pay attention. Currency is exchanged. There is an offering (our teaching) and a cost (students must divert their attention from other sources). Reflecting on both sides of this equation in the context of what science knows and what our teaching does can help us to improve the classroom experience for teachers and students.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, reminds us of the stakes: the greater the attention that is paid, the more we learn. The neural mechanisms that influence attention are complex; Medina states that our attention is influenced by a combination of memory, interest and awareness. Our prior experiences (and how we remember them) affect attention. Whether or not we define something as aligned with one of our interests will also impact if the brain latches on to the new information. Finally, if we are so focused on something else (a cell phone, perhaps) that we lack awareness that our teacher is calling our name, we aren’t able to give our attention where it’s due. Creating classroom experiences that grab and hold students’ attention and teaching students the connection between attention and learning is not only good teaching, it’s good science.

Medina offers four critical components to becoming an attention-savvy educator.

Emotions as Chemical Post-it Notes

Think of emotions as chemical Post-it notes, Medina says. Emotions paint an experience in fluorescent orange, making us more likely to notice and retain the information at hand. How? Emotions trigger a release of dopamine into our system, and dopamine improves our ability to remember. For example, you probably remember vivid details from your wedding day, the birth of your first child or defending your dissertation. But do you remember the day before or after those momentous events? Probably not. Now reflect on your classroom learning experiences; your most vivid memories are probably tied to happiness, excitement, shame or fear.

How can we intentionally incorporate emotions into our classrooms to increase attention? First, share your enthusiasm for your subject with your students. What made you fall in love with the study of psychology in the first place? Why do you believe that the humanities will save the world? How did you feel the first time you looked into a microscope? This is as important as the theoretical or practical content you’re about to teach them.

Next, tell stories. If you don’t have a story, find someone else’s online (TED talks are a great emotional resource). Draw students into the topic emotionally to attach a Post-it note to your instruction. Think that your subject matter prevents you from incorporating emotional stories into your teaching? Check out the work of the late Randy Pausch, a computer science professor who considered storytelling one of his most powerful teaching strategies.

Do the Why Work

Daniel Pink, an expert in motivation and the author of Drive, states that “why” is “the most underused word in the modern workplace.” Could we say the same of the modern classroom? Pink goes on to assert that people are “thirsting for context.” According to Medina, we can gain our students’ attention by quenching their thirst for why.

Much of this “why work” starts in the course development and lesson planning stages of teaching. Begin by answering this question in one sentence: What is the purpose of your course? Ideally, this will connect to the why of your program and the why of your institution. If you can’t articulate the answers to these questions, how can you expect your students to understand the big picture of their course, program, and college?

Concept mapping (or mind mapping) is an excellent next step. You can find a great free mind-mapping tool at Text 2 Mind Map. Draw your course. How do the concepts you’ll be teaching in week one connect to the overarching why of the course? How does week two connect to week one? If these connections aren’t there, build them or reconsider the value of including them in the first place. I’ve noticed teachers getting better at the what; many will place an agenda on the board at the start of a class or at the start of a new module in an online classroom. But for our brains, more important than the what is the why. Medina argues that brains are hierarchical and prefer to learn from the top down. He won a teaching award for designing 10-minute lectures that applied this model.

Medina also cites the work of John Bransford, emeritus endowed chair in learning sciences in the College of Education at the University of Washington, who argued that the difference between an expert and a novice is that an expert can explain connections between ideas, while a novice can only list the ideas. Step into your role as an expert. Don’t just tell -- teach.

Create a Device-Free Zone

When I was teaching in a land-based classroom, I used to allow laptops. It felt forward thinking to give students this option. I’ve since changed my mind. Brain science has confirmed that our brains cannot multitask. Each time we switch tasks, we have to restart that brain sequence. Medina estimates that multitasking takes 50 percent longer than focusing on one thing at a time. The recent findings on laptop use in classrooms support the idea that decreasing classroom distractions and limiting opportunities for students to attempt to multitask are valid teaching strategies.

I recently sat next to a young woman during a lecture where I was in a student role. Every 10 minutes, her phone buzzed. I would glance in her direction, pulled away from the teacher’s words. She didn’t flinch. I wondered to myself if we’ve entered a phase where we are so desensitized to our devices that vibrate is the new silent. I now have a personal habit of keeping my phone set to do not disturb unless I’m expecting an important call. I have a landline where I can be reached alternately. I get to choose when I turn my attention to my device, not the other way around.

Create distraction-free classrooms, but do so as a teacher, not a tyrant. In the first days of your course, share the research on distractions with your students. Talk to them about screen addiction and attention, and show them the value of focusing on their course instead of their device.

For online students, the stakes are even higher. If your online courses aren’t teaching students how to limit distractions while online, you are doing them a disservice. Teach students to turn off notifications and devices while working on their online courses. Again, do the why work here to show students the value of paying attention.

Rest and Digest

Does it seem like the number of course objectives associated with your course grows each term? Do you feel increasingly constrained by time? Many professors do. But beware of the urge to cram more content into your courses. Medina equates this to force-feeding and argues that brains need more time to digest. Because the brain is, as Medina explains, a “sequential processor,” it needs to fully process one idea before it can move on to the next. Simplify. Students will paradoxically learn more when you teach less.

Medina offers an outline for a typical 50-minute lecture-based class period. Break the class into five sections, because most people start to lose interest after 10 minutes. The first minute of each section should be spent on an emotional-meaning maker. Hook them. Writing teachers: you know the value of a great hook. Grab them with that first minute in order to hold them for the next nine when you can focus on details and explanation. Repeat.

Continue to do the why work throughout the lecture, bringing students back to the central purpose of the class so that their brains don’t have to switch tasks. Professors can swap out lecture segments with other strategies like individual journaling or small-group activities. The same overarching model of hook, big picture and details still applies.
By incorporating these rules into your teaching and your classrooms, you can begin to harness the power of attention. And remember, we are students, too. Reflecting on the role of attention in your own life can only serve to improve your ability to teach these concepts to your students.

Source | https://www.insidehighered.com/

Bridging the digital divide

India is among the underperformers on access to Information and Communications Technology

One of the parameters of assessing societal development of a country is the extent to which there has been penetration of information and communications technology (ICT) through the Internet, mobile phone subscriptions or through the degree of press freedom given to the journalists, news organisations and citizens of a country. Access to ICT also gains relevance in the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 of the United Nations, with greater relevance for the least developed countries to be able to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet to its people. 

Over-performers, underperformers

Though ICT has promoted development across various dimensions of society from connecting individuals to spreading across businesses, and governments, there exists a digital divide in its accessibility between the high income and low income countries, with high income countries typically showing greater penetration of digital technology as compared to less developed countries. While in high income countries such as Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden, over 90 per cent of the population is using the Internet, in lower income countries such as Afghanistan, Sub-Saharan African countries such as Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Malawi, less than 10 per cent of the population uses it. Similarly, with regard to the extent of mobile penetration, Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest mobile penetration of 73 per cent, compared to 98 per cent penetration in high income countries (World Development Report 2016). 

Given a high degree of correlation between the economic progress of a country and its access to ICT, there are countries which have over-performed relative to their economic peers in providing digital technology. One such country worth mentioning here is Costa Rica, which is the world’s top over-performer, known for its communication technology and also press freedom. Similarly, there are countries which have underperformed among their income peers on access to information and communication. For instance, Cuba, which has the lowest number of mobile phone subscriptions and lowest press freedom index, has been the most underperforming country on access to information and communication. Further, two of the world’s most populated countries — India and China — are also among the few underperformers on access to ICT. India, which has been appreciated globally for providing IT services, faces a huge digital divide, having a relatively low percentage of population with access to the Internet. In 2014, it had only about 18 people per 100 using the Internet (World Bank Data). China on the other hand has a very weak press freedom index, resulting in its overall low performance on access to ICT. Apart from the digital divide existing between countries, there also exists a gap in adoption of digital technology across different demographic groups within the country. 

The World Development Report 2016 highlights such differences in accessibility to the Internet in Africa, where gaps arise out of differences in factors such as income, location, gender and age. For instance, greater access to the Internet is seen in the top 60 per cent of the population based on income distribution compared to the bottom 40 per cent. Further, women use less digital technology compared to men, and gaps are even greater between the youth (20 per cent) and the matured population (8 per cent). 

Increasing access to ICT 

To be able to promote greater social progress in the world, it is imperative to increase access to information and communication technology universally. With the world presently scoring 62.99 on a scale of 100 in access to ICT, higher overall social progress could be achieved by overcoming the digital divides that exist between the countries regardless of their level of economic progress. 

One of the ways to bring about greater penetration of digital technology in society is to make it more affordable. This could be realised through support from multilateral organisations to the underperforming countries by helping them build their communication infrastructure. Moreover, promoting greater market competition in Internet provision and encouraging public-private partnerships in building ICT infrastructure could increase the affordability of digital technology and thereby improve access to it. Further, digital divides could be bridged to an extent by bringing greater awareness among citizens about the use of digital technology which could help in reducing information inequality in society. 

While increasing penetration of digital technology by bridging the existing digital divides is associated with greater social progress of a country, it is also essential to build up the corresponding human capital necessary for making optimal use of the technology. ICT can benefit the economy through increasing productivity gains only if people having access to the technology also have the requisite skills for making optimal use of it. 

Amit Kapoor is Chair of the Institute for Competitiveness and Deepti Mathur is part of the team working on the Social Progress Index for India.

Source | Business Line | 28 July 2016

Taking IT skills to the masses

Taking IT skills to the masses
DISHA, an ambitious government initiative, strives to impart IT education to more than 50 lakh individuals by 2018

New Delhi: The quest to make India a digital superpower requires that its citizens understand the basics of information technology (IT). So, to equip citizens with knowledge of IT basics, the government and its various agencies such as the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) came up with the National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) in August 2014. The idea was to train 10 lakh citizens of the country.

A similar, but in some ways bigger, initiative, called DISHA (Digital Saksharta Abhiyan) was announced in November 2014 with the objective of imparting IT skills to at least one person from every family until 52.5 lakh people are educated by December 2018.

While NDLM has achieved its target of training and certifying 10 lakh candidates, DISHA is well on its way, having certified 20 lakh students so far.

DISHA, having become one of the key projects in the build-up to Digital India, has been nominated for the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s mBillionth Award 2016 under the learning and education category.

It is basically a learning management system and is being implemented by CSC e-Governance Services India Ltd, a special purpose vehicle (SPV) incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013.

DISHA works by inviting individuals to register on the ndlm.in website or the DISHA app, which was created to reach a wider demographic. The app was developed in-house by CSC using open source tools.

“We used internal resources and tied up with various agencies and stakeholders for the development on a need basis,” said Dinesh Kumar Tyagi, CEO, CSC.

The app supports English, Hindi and Bengali and is available for free on all Android devices.

Users can watch video-based classes, download and read e-books in offline mode and also self-assess their performance on the app by taking tests. The tests have been classified into three categories based on the level of difficulty. Students can register using their Aadhaar number.

Since both the website and later the app were developed using open source technology, there was no cost incurred in the development of software. But as the number of users grew, CSC had to buy more hosting space for the website and hire more people. Currently, the DISHA team consists of 30 project consultants in the central team and one consultant in every state and Union territory.

To provide training, it has tied up with over 1,900 training partners and over 80,000 training centres. The job of these partners and centres is to provide training. While the content used by them is provided by the programme management unit of CSC, certification is provided by well-known institutions such as National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, National Institute of Open Schooling and ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu.

To ensure the initiative functioned smoothly, DISHA received a grant of Rs.440 crore from the Union government.

The results have been very promising. As of June, 20 lakh candidates have been trained and issued certificates.

The biggest challenge DISHA faced was reaching candidates in areas with poor connectivity. Then there was the matter of scale as they had to cover all states and Union territories in the country. For this, they had to find the right training partners and centres. The easy availability of smartphones has helped the initiative reach out to a wider user base.

DeitY is looking forward to channel the campaign into the Digital India initiative. One of the seven pillars of the Digital India initiative is e-Kranti which promises electronic delivery of services. DISHA will get a big boost once it is clubbed with e-Kranti.

“Digital literacy is a key component of the Union government’s vision of building an empowered society as envisaged under the Digital India initiative. Spin-off effects of digital literacy, especially in the context of rural India, would address a number of socioeconomic issues,” said Sanjay Kumar Vyas, additional director, DeitY and the officer handling the DISHA scheme for the government.

Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 27 July 2016

Educating India, changing India

Change in India is a complex process of introducing new ideas, dealing with multiple interest groups, and trying to reshape institutions through which activities take place. Nowhere is the need for change more urgent than in the education sector, because the lack of adequate human capital may be the biggest constraint that India faces in seeking faster economic growth.

Change in India is a complex process of introducing new ideas, dealing with multiple interest groups, and trying to reshape institutions through which activities take place. Nowhere is the need for change more urgent than in the education sector, because the lack of adequate human capital may be the biggest constraint that India faces in seeking faster economic growth. Of course, thinking about education leads to concerns about health and nutrition, physical infrastructure and so on, but let us put those aside for the moment.

What is interesting is how much we have learned in the last decade about the process of education in India. Clearly, the institutional mechanisms work well as screening devices, as well as imparting certain basic skills to a slice of the population. The best products of the system do very well in globally competitive environments, but like many other aspects of Indian life, there is a steep fall off in skills going below the top, much more than the natural distribution of human abilities might predict. As is now clearly understood, national efforts like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) improved access and enrolment numbers, but not necessarily learning outcomes.

A well-known problem is that of teacher absence, or of teacher incentives in general. Teaching aides may have better incentives, and seem to help, but the deeper problem is one of pedagogical methods. The NGO Pratham has been a leader in trying to change the classroom learning process (as well as documenting deficiencies in traditional delivery mechanisms), with measurable positive results. It has also pioneered supplemental approaches such as expanding access to after-school tuition, or in-school remedial education to help learning laggards catch up before they fall permanently behind.

In the past weeks, I attended a conference where one paper documented an experiment seeking to establish whether enabling more students to afford after-school tuition improved learning outcomes—it did not—and another paper that measured whether using adaptive learning software for mathematics improved learning outcomes; it did. These were specific additions to our knowledge, based on careful research. In another conference, a panel on skill development highlighted the breadth of India’s skilling challenge, and left me wondering where and how one should start, beyond simply listing all the needed skills across industries, sectors and jobs. Then I travelled to Punjab, where I learned about a successful remedial learning programme run locally by the Nabha Foundation, dating as far back as Pratham’s first efforts. I also learned about the distance learning program at Punjabi University, Patiala, which is different from larger-scale efforts such as Punjab Technical University, or the 800-pound gorilla that is Indira Gandhi National Open University.

All of these examples were leading me to think of what kinds of changes might be cost-effective, improve learning outcomes simultaneously with access, and be implementable without having to battle entrenched interests and getting swallowed in existing institutional dysfunction. Reading further, I came across what might be the best example of research on how to bring about change in India: the focus is on education, but the lessons may turn out to be very general.

Yamini Aiyar, Vincy Davis and Ambrish Dongre conducted a lengthy detailed qualitative study of frontline education administration in Bihar, with over 100 interviews. What emerged was a picture of “organisational design of the education administration which privileges a top-down, rule-based hierarchy that leaves local administrators little by way of authority” and creates “a narrative of powerlessness.” What led to positive change in some locations? This happened when “district leaders encouraged active dialogue and problem-solving” with frontline administrators, instead of “expressing leadership through hierarchy and demands for compliance.” Indeed, the project showed that Pratham-style pedagogical improvements in the classroom worked, but these were met with pessimism by frontline administrators who saw themselves only as “reporting machines.” This work suggests that marginal changes may never be sustainable, but instead the harder task of modifying institutional structures and attitudes within organisations has to be undertaken for large-scale improvements in education access and outcomes.

We have seen the germ of this story in case studies where local control of schools in India has led to improved teacher accountability and performance. We can also get a sense of why SSA ultimately did not improve learning outcomes. The study’s authors emphasise changing work culture and management practices, but this may also require decentralising the education bureaucracy, so that it permits local improvements, and focuses on providing support rather than enforcing hierarchical compliance. Of course, this is the change needed within every classroom in India. Children in school do better with tailored support than with blanket rules. So do young adults in university or other training venues. And so do government officials, whether in the education bureaucracy or in any other one of India’s many bureaucratic structures. Beginning this change may therefore be the key to effecting real change in India.

Source | http://www.financialexpress.com/fe-columnist/educating-india-changing-india/329950/

Apps for your web browser

Apps for your web browser
Google Chrome can be a lot more than just your gateway to the Internet—the correct set of add-ons can make it even more productive

Google Chrome is a tremendously popular Web browser. Research by Web analytics firm Netmarketshare in June showed it has a global market share of 48.65%, with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera and Vivaldi fighting for the rest of the pie.

But Google Chrome is much more than just a Web-browsing app. It has its own app store, called the Chrome Web Store, from where you can download apps and extensions that can be bolted on to the Chrome browser on your PC or Mac computer, adding functionality to the browser. For most tasks and purposes, the Chrome ecosystem, with its add-ons, can be a wholesome computing environment in itself. But if you want an even better browsing experience, try these free apps and extensions.

Google Docs

Google Docs is pretty much the ultimate app for any professional, since it is a capable alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. The Google Docs suite allows you to edit, view and create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations from within the Web browser. You can open any file created in the Office suite and edit it here. The fact that Google has integrated the Drive cloud storage makes this even more productive.

Gmail Offline

It might be one of the most popular email services, but one of the headaches of Gmail is that when you are accessing it through a browser, it is mainly a Web service—you need to be connected to the Internet to access your mailbox and get new mails. And that is exactly the problem that this extension tries to overcome. It synchronizes with your Gmail account when you first use it and, thereafter, works just like an offline client within your browser. Though it will download and send new mails when you go online again, what it will let you do is search through your mails and read them even when you are not connected to the Internet. The extension is still in the beta-testing phase, but it’s worth a try.

Kindle Cloud Reader

The jury may still be out on the popularity of e-books, but one cannot deny the sheer convenience that they provide—allowing people to read books without having to carry them around physically. And if you add Kindle’s Cloud Reader to your Chrome browser, you will be able to access your library and read any book from your e-book collection right within the browser. The feature set allows you to tweak fonts, make notes, insert bookmarks and check the meanings of words from a dictionary, just as you can on a regular Kindle e-book reader.

Momentum

Opening a new tab in a browser can be a relatively routine experience. Momentum ensures that it isn’t. When you click on a new tab, what you get is a colourful background image, a weather update, an inspiring quote, links to your favourite websites, and your to-do list for the day. Definitely a step up from the default blank “new tab” that you see on Web browsers.

Hover Zoom+

This is the perfect addition for those who find themselves squinting at the thumbnail-sized images on some websites. This app allows you to see an enlarged version of the image (you can specify how much in the settings) whenever you hover your mouse over it. It’s a great option for social networking and e-shopping addicts who hate to click on images and wait for their enlarged versions to load.

MightyText

Pretty much a must-have app/extension if you use an Android phone as well, MightyText allows you to send and receive text and multimedia messages from your Chrome browser instead of your phone. You can see your Android app notifications, sync the photographs on your phone, even get alerts when your phone is running low on battery. This is pretty much the app for those who do not want to be distracted every time the phone rings.

Noisli

Noisli ensures that you have just the right ambient noises to help you get along with your work, whether it is the sound of birds trilling in the forest or the sound of raindrops. All you need to do is tap an icon for peace to descend. You can even create your own blend of sounds.

Gestures for Google Chrome

If you would like to add gesture support to your browser, just download this handy little app, specify the gestures you would like on the PC’s touch pad and the tasks these gestures should execute. So you can make a three-finger swipe shut all open tabs except for the one you are currently browsing. Or ensure another gesture opens a blank tab in the background. It is a bit geeky, but very handy once you get the hang of it.

WHAT ABOUT ANDROID APPS?

Reports suggest that Google is thinking of allowing Android apps—at least some of them—to run within the Chrome browser. There are some apps that already let you do this (including Google’s Arc Welder tool), but given the fact that Google is extending the Google Play store to Chrome OS devices such as the Google Chromebook, chances are Google will allow Android apps on the Chrome browser officially too. You will, of course, need a PC with a touch screen for optimum use—Android apps are tailored for touch controls.

Source | http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/eKNlCtWBKkIVqXFdLHSkPL/Apps-for-your-web-browser.html

Tips to reduce digital overload on the eye

Tips to reduce digital overload on the eye
If you are dealing with symptoms such as red, watery and itchy eyes, frequent headaches and visual fatigue, you are not alone! With constant exposure to digital devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets, e-readers etc, a large number of people are experiencing increase in symptoms of eye fatigue in recent times, says Shivkumar J, CEO, Essilor India.

While digital devices are here to stay, Essilor has taken note of the trend to come up with products to protect you from the impact of digital overload, consumers also need to follow some basic measures to counter rising visual fatigue. Here are some essential tips:

Take frequent breaks from your computer: While it may not be possible to reduce their usage, frequent breaks can be taken in between to give some rest to the eyes. Also important is to just stand up from your desk every hour and look away from the computer for a few minutes.

Minimize Glare: Excessive glare on your monitor adds to the eye strain. Try to reduce reflections in your surroundings by using window blinds, avoiding bright light sources in your room, and installing glare filters on your monitor screen.

Reduce social media addiction: While a bulk of our digital exposure comes from essential work, a major part of it also due to our constant addiction to social media networks. Restrict your addiction, and you can reduce almost an hour of unnecessary exposure every day.

Use protective eyewear: Use spectacle lenses customized to the need of the times, which can offer prevention and protection for your eyes against digital overload, harmful blue light, strain and fatigue.

Never carry your smartphone to bed: Make sure you keep your phone away at least half an hour before going to bed; get rid of the habit of lurking on to social media channels before falling asleep.

Source | http://www.freepressjournal.in/webspecial/tips-to-reduce-digital-overload-on-the-eye/897321

Aksharaveedhi: An open-air library in Kerala that makes books accessible to all

Aksharaveedhi: An open-air library in Kerala that makes books accessible to all

People need not necessarily ‘walk in’ to this open-air library.

How often have we yearned for a quiet weekend spent reading the books we have always put off? What would make the equation more desirable, you ask? A cup of steaming hot tea, sitting out in the open, where nobody would demand a subscription fee, nor would ask you to leave.

A group of artists and art lovers in Thiruvananthapuram is not only basking in the sunshine, but also in the glory of having conceptualised an open-air library.

For over a month now, an open-air library called “Aksharaveedhi” has been functioning on the streets of “Manaveeyam Veedhi” (cultural corridor). The Malayalam word “Aksharaveedhi” roughly translates to “the path of words”.

For the uninitiated, “Manaveeyam Veedhi” took shape in the year 2001 as the State Cultural Affairs Department’s initiative to support artistes and to make art more accessible to the public.

Since then, the street would come alive on weekends with art exhibitions and folk song programmes, and became a platform where artists from across the state could meet.

The open-air library was conceptualised by Team Nizhalattam, an artists’ forum with close to 100 members. It functions during the weekends from 6 am till late in to the night. The books include famous novels and children's literature in Malayalam, English and Hindi. However, newspapers, that figure into the essentials list for a Malayali after food, shelter and clothing, are made available throughout the week.

Ratheesh Rohini, a member of Nizhalattam says that the team has managed to collect over a thousand books so far, most of them donated by the public. However, only 500-odd books and some Malayalam newspapers are displayed in the one book-shelf that is kept on the street.

Arun Samgraha, an artist, is the kingpin of the concept.

Anything that is easily accessible to the public naturally attracts safety concerns. However, at “Aksharaveedhi”, one would not find anybody keeping a watch over the books. Though the initial few days saw a couple of newspapers being lost, gradually it stopped.

“Even when it rains, some one or the other who is present there would wrap a sheet over the book-shelf.  It is the responsibility of every individual to do so. Along with encouraging a reading culture, we also want to promote these kind of values,” Ratheesh says. The team looks plans to introduce CDs of classic films to their collection in the future.

Source | http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/malayalam-author-allegedly-attacked-using-word-padachon-his-book-47094

The science of improving your work life

The science of improving your work life
Caroline Webb, author of ‘How to Have a Good Day’ and chief executive of Sevenshift, on what you can do to have a more fulfilling work life.

Whether you’re working at your dream job or you’ve been plotting your escape for months, chances are that you’ve experienced your fair share of days that simply can’t end soon enough. Caroline Webb, chief executive of Sevenshift, an advisory firm focused on performance in the workplace, and a senior adviser to McKinsey & Co., has put together a guide for improving our work life with her new book How to Have a Good Day.

Drawing upon extensive research in the fields of neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, Webb draws out key lessons on how we can make our work smarter, productive and ultimately more satisfying. Edited excerpts from an interview:

In the book there is an emphasis on priorities and focus. How does the science indicate that those things are so important?

Well, the importance of being deliberate, let’s say, about our priorities and our goals comes from the way that our brain processes information. Our conscious brain can only process a portion of reality around us at any one time, which is kind of hard to accept, because subconsciously we’re filtering out most of what’s going on around us, and we don’t really like to think of ourselves as not being objective observers of the world.

But what the brain decides to consciously prioritize and make sure we notice are things that resonate with what is already top of mind for us. It means that if you’ve decided that something is a priority, you are way more likely to notice it than if it isn’t.

There’s a classic study which is done with a bunch of radiologists who are looking through a pile of lung scans and there was a gorilla printed on the last one. The vast majority of them, 83%, didn’t see the gorilla even though eye-tracking devices showed they’d looked directly at it. The reason is it wasn’t their priority. If we go into a meeting looking for a fight, we’ll probably get it. If we go in looking for collaboration, we’ll probably get that. It’s really remarkable how the facts can appear to change once we’ve decided what our priorities are.

You talk about the interaction between the mind and the body when it comes to us having a good day.

There are reasons you want to look after your body for health reasons, but we know that. The bit we’re much less aware of is the fact that the way you treat your body has an immediate effect on the quality of the thinking that you do and the way that you feel emotionally. You immediately boost your focus and your mood by, say, doing 10-20 minutes of moderate activity. If people understood that there’s an immediate payoff to breaks, exercise, downtime, they’d see it much less as time out and much more as time invested.

How can we best manage our workflow so we have a bit of downtime?

I don’t say there’s only one time of day that you should do any particular type of task—it’s about self-awareness and starting to notice when you’re at your best and giving that time to your most important task. Beyond that, there is some general advice that everybody can take.

First of all, single tasking. If you do one thing at a time you’ll get things done much more quickly and much more brilliantly than if you multitask. The conscious brain can only do one thing at a time, so if you’re checking your email while you’re trying to write something or trying to talk to someone then you are essentially asking your brain to keep switching back and forth and of course that’s inefficient. So going offline while you’re doing your most important task for the day and just really focusing on that one thing means that you get it done more quickly.

The other general thing is the importance of strategic downtime.

All the research suggests that the quality of your decisions and choices declines the longer it is since you’ve had a break. That’s pretty stark. So the idea of taking breaks being for wimps, it’s just not true if you care about the quality of your work. So be tactical about ‘when can I get a five-minute break between meetings, can I end meetings slightly early, can I plan more breathing room that allows me to reflect on.

You talk about the discover-defence axis (how we are subconsciously on the lookout for threats and rewards) and how even small slights can put us into this place where we’re less productive. In a modern-day office environment, feedback, evaluation and criticism are so important. How should these things be handled?

Critical feedback is almost perfectly designed to put a brain on the defensive and (then) they’re not able to think as clearly because the brain is devoting some effort to that defensive response. And obviously then what happens is the change that you’re hoping for doesn’t manifest itself. So, how can you give feedback in a way that doesn’t put people on the defensive? There are three brain-friendly feedback techniques that I talk about, and one of them is to be really, really explicit and clear and fulsome and specific about the things that you like about what they’re doing so that the framing is: “What I really like about this is… specific thing, specific thing, specific thing, what would make me like it even more is….”

There are two things going on here. One is that people talk about the ‘praise sandwich’ and the fact that it’s a good idea to say something positive before you say something negative, but the problem with that classic approach is that it only solves a fraction of the problem. We’re all geared to be more sensitive to threats than to rewards. So you have to be aware that one piece of negative feedback will drown out positive feedback unless you make sure that the positive feedback is believable and credible.
And the way to do that, and this is the second thing to note, is that the brain much prefers concrete examples to generalities. So if you hear someone say, “You’re great, you’re great, now here are five things that I think you could do differently….” It’s obvious when I say it like that, but the truth is that is often the way that feedback is delivered. You think, “Well, I’m generally saying you’re amazing, so surely that should be enough”, but no, what you remember are the specifics, the stories, the examples. And so that’s why the format of what I really like about ‘specific, specific, specific, and then what would make me like it even more’ is it’s just a really good way of keeping people off the defensive, while telling them exactly what they need to hear, so it’s not a soft option.

If we’re having a bad day, how can we react to that?

I actually split (the part of the book on resilience) into three. The first one is staying cool in the moment. You’re in the meeting and it’s going badly, how do you stay calm? But then there’s also after the fact, how do you move on? Because they’re almost like two different skills.

Then there is sort of an even longer-term skill, which is just recognizing all the things we were touching on before, which is that the way you treat your body helps your emotional resilience over time. So there are a few different dimensions of resilience and handling a bad day.

One thing that I find super helpful when you’re in the middle of a situation that isn’t feeling great is to use the distancing technique, and that’s where you put yourself in a different perspective. I personally like the distance of saying, “What am I going to think about this looking back in a year’s time?” There’s a CEO I was coaching who likes saying, “If someone else was CEO of this company, what would I advise them?” All of these distancing techniques have been shown to reduce the level of defensiveness.

There’s another killer technique, which is called reappraisal. If it’s a recurring thing or is just something you’re finding hard to move on from, it’s really helpful to use this technique. It is essentially telling yourself a different story about what could be going on. You first home in on what the facts are and strip it of interpretation. Instead of saying, for example, “My boss never pays me any attention”—that’s a generalization, it’s also a tiny bit emotional—what you do know for sure is perhaps something more like “My boss didn’t invite me to speak at this week’s team meeting”. In fact, what you actually know given the brain’s filtering and the fact that reality is subjective is “I don’t remember my boss asking me to speak at the team meeting”. So the first step is getting clear on the facts, and then you say, “Okay, what could be an explanation of that?”

And it almost doesn’t matter if you believe the stories that you make up, but the very fact of starting to contemplate other explanations than “I’m being ignored” has been shown to not only improve your resilience to specific situations going on wrong now, but actually boost your resilience longer term to something that goes wrong later.

Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 26 July 2016

Scientists work toward storing digital information in DNA

Scientists work toward storing digital information in DNA
July 23, 2016 by Malcolm Ritter
Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her "digital attic"—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She'd like to preserve the stuff "as long as I live, at least," says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, "which is a little bit of a headache."

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in DNA—the stuff our genes are made of.

Strauss, who works at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, is working to make that sci-fi fantasy a reality.

She and other scientists are not focused in finding ways to stow high school projects or snapshots or other things an average person might accumulate, at least for now. Rather, they aim to help companies and institutions archive huge amounts of data for decades or centuries, at a time when the world is generating digital data faster than it can store it.
To understand her quest, it helps to know how companies, governments and other institutions store data now: For long-term storage it's typically disks or a specialized kind of tape, wound up in cartridges about three inches on a side and less than an inch thick. A single cartridge containing about half a mile of tape can hold the equivalent of about 46 million books of 200 pages apiece, and three times that much if the data lends itself to being compressed.

A tape cartridge can store data for about 30 years under ideal conditions, says Matt Starr, chief technology officer of Spectra Logic, which sells data-storage devices. But a more practical limit is 10 to 15 years, he says.

It's not that the data will disappear from the tape. A bigger problem is familiar to anybody who has come across an old eight-track tape or floppy disk and realized he no longer has a machine to play it. Technology moves on, and data can't be retrieved if the means to read it is no longer available, Starr says.

So for that and other reasons, long-term archiving requires repeatedly copying the data to new technologies.

Into this world comes the notion of DNA storage. DNA is by its essence an information-storing molecule; the genes we pass from generation to generation transmit the blueprints for creating the human body. That information is stored in strings of what's often called the four-letter DNA code. That really refers to sequences of four building blocks—abbreviated as A, C, T and G—found in the DNA molecule. Specific sequences give the body directions for creating particular proteins.

Digital devices, on the other hand, store information in a two-letter code that produces strings of ones and zeroes. A capital "A," for example, is 01000001.

Converting digital information to DNA involves translating between the two codes. In one lab, for example, a capital A can become ATATG. The idea is once that transformation is made, strings of DNA can be custom-made to carry the new code, and hence the information that code contains.

One selling point is durability. Scientists can recover and read DNA sequences from fossils of Neanderthals and even older life forms. So as a storage medium, "it could last thousands and thousands of years," says Luis Ceze of the University of Washington, who works with Microsoft on DNA data storage.

Advocates also stress that DNA crams information into very little space. Almost every cell of your body carries about six feet of it; that adds up to billions of miles in a single person. In terms of information storage, that compactness could mean storing all the publicly accessible data on the internet in a space the size of a shoebox, Ceze says.

In fact, all the digital information in the world might be stored in a load of whitish, powdery DNA that fits in space the size of a large van, says Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England.

What's more, advocates say, DNA storage would avoid the problem of having to repeatedly copy stored information into new formats as the technology for reading it becomes outmoded.

"There's always going to be someone in the business of making a DNA reader because of the health care applications," Goldman says. "It's always something we're going to want to do quickly and inexpensively."

Getting the information into DNA takes some doing. Once scientists have converted the digital code into the 4-letter DNA code, they have to custom-make DNA. For some recent research Strauss and Ceze worked on, that involved creating about 10 million short strings of DNA.

Twist Bioscience of San Francisco used a machine to create the strings letter by letter, like snapping together Lego pieces to build a tower. The machine can build up to 1.6 million strings at a time.

Each string carried just a fragment of information from a digital file, plus a chemical tag to indicate what file the information came from.

To read a file, scientists use the tags to assemble the relevant strings. A standard lab machine can then reveal the sequence of DNA letters in each string.

Nobody is talking about replacing hard drives in consumer computers with DNA. For one thing, it takes too long to read the stored information. That's never going to be accomplished in seconds, says Ewan Birney, who works on DNA storage with Goldman at the bioinformatics institute.

But for valuable material like corporate records in long-term storage, "if it's worth it, you'll wait," says Goldman, who with Birney is talking to investors about setting up a company to offer DNA storage.

Sri Kosuri of the University of California Los Angeles, who has worked on DNA information storage but now largely moved on to other pursuits, says one challenge for making the technology practical is making it much cheaper.

Scientists custom-build fairly short strings DNA now for research, but scaling up enough to handle information storage in bulk would require a "mind-boggling" leap in output, Kosuri says. With current technology, that would be hugely expensive, he says.

George Church, a prominent Harvard genetics expert, agrees that cost is a big issue. But "I'm pretty optimistic it can be brought down" dramatically in a decade or less, says Church, who is in the process of starting a company to offer DNA storage methods.

For all the interest in the topic, it's worth noting that so far the amount of information that researchers have stored in DNA is relatively tiny.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that a team including Strauss and Ceze had stored a record 200 megabytes. The information included 100 books—one, fittingly, was "Great Expectations"— along with a brief video and many documents. But it was still less than 5 percent the capacity of an ordinary DVD.

Yet it's about nine times the mark reported just last month by Church, who says the announcement shows "how fast the field is moving."

Meanwhile, people involved with archiving digital data say their field views DNA as a possibility for the future, but not a cure-all.

"It's a very interesting and promising approach to the storage problem, but the storage problem is really only a very small part of digital preservation," says Cal Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science.

It's true that society will probably always have devices to read DNA, so that gets around the problem of obsolete readers, he says. But that's not enough.

"If you just read the ones and zeroes, you don't know how to interpret it," Lee says.

For example, is that string a picture, text, a sound clip or a video? Do you still have the software to make sense of it?

What's more, the people in charge of keeping digital information want to check on it periodically to make sure it's still intact, and "I don't know how viable that is with DNA," says Euan Cochrane, digital preservation manager at the Yale University Library. It may mean fewer such check-ups, he says.

Cochrane, who describes his job as keeping information accessible "10 years to forever," says DNA looks interesting if its cost can be reduced and scientists find ways to more quickly store and recover information.

Starr says his data-storage device company hasn't taken a detailed look at DNA technology because it's too far in the future.

There are "always things out on the horizon that could store data for a very long time," he says. But the challenge of turning those ideas into a practical product "really trims the field down pretty quickly."

Link | http://phys.org/news/2016-07-scientists-digital-dna.html

Soon, world’s first library of ice archives to come up in Antarctica

Soon, world’s first library of ice archives to come up in Antarctica
Starting 15 August until the beginning of September, an international team of around ten glaciologists and engineers - French, Italian, Russian and American - will be travelling to the Col du Dome (4,300 m or 14,108 feett) on Europe's highest peak, Mont Blanc to drill ice cores. They are part of the unique Protecting Ice Memory project, which is aimed at drawing out long tubes of ice from glaciers for their preservation in Antarctica. The purpose is to build the world's first library of ice archives extracted from glaciers which are threatened by global warming.

"In the coming decades, or even centuries, this ice archive will be invaluable - be it for entirely unprecedented scientific discoveries or for understanding local changes in the environment," said Jean Jouzel, climatologist and Vice-Chair of the IPCC, 2002-2015.

Three ice cores, each measuring 130 meters in length, will be extracted and lowered into the valley by helicopter before being transported to the LGGE in Grenoble, while maintaining a strict cold chain throughout the process. One core will be analysed in 2019 to begin building a database available to the entire world scientific community. The other two will be transported by ship before being transferred onto tracked vehicles on the high plateaus of Antarctica in 2020 for storage at the Concordia station, which is run by French and Italian scientists. The long-term plan is to have dozens of ice core archives stored in a snow cave at -54°C , which is the most reliable and natural freezer in the world.

The Col du Dome glacier represents the first step in this major project, originally launched in 2015 by the LGGE, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and the CNR (Italian National Research Council), backed by the Universite Grenoble Alpes Foundation. A second, longer and more complex operation will be carried out in 2017 on the Illimani glacier in the Bolivian Andes. A number of other countries are already candidates to join this project and protect the memory of the glaciers to which they have access: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, the United States, Russia, China, Nepal and Canada.

The idea to create this project was born when scientists observed a rise in temperatures on several glaciers. At ten-year intervals, the temperature near to the glaciers on the Col du Dome and Illimani in the Andes has risen between 1.5° and 2°. At the current rate, their surface will undergo systematic melting over the summer in the next few years and decades. Due to this melting and the percolation of meltwater through the underlying layers of snow, these are unique pages in the history of our environment which will be lost forever.

"We are the only community of scientists working on climate to see a chunk of its archives disappearing. We urgently need to build this heritage for the future, much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault kept on the island of Spitsbergen," explains Jerome Chappellaz, the French project initiator from CNRS.

"Our generation of scientists, which bears witness to global warming, has a particular responsibility to future generations. That is why we will be donating these ice samples from the world's most fragile glaciers to the scientific community of the decades and centuries to come, when these glaciers would have disappeared or lost their data quality," adds Carlo Barbante, the Italian project initiator from Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

Source | http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Soon-worlds-first-library-of-ice-archives-to-come-up-in-Antarctica/articleshow/53323864.cms

More children are going to school, but they’re not really learning

More children are going to school, but they’re not really learning
Innovative technologies can help bridge the gap
Roughly three million children are out of school in India. Civil society estimates show that of the children in school, at least 53 per cent are behind expected learning levels.
India has often been hailed as a laboratory for enterprise and innovation but how do we channel that spirit and know-how into tackling the problems we have in education? At an event organised by the Asia Society on Tuesday, Maheshwar Peri, founder and chair of Careers360 moderated a discussion about how innovative platforms and tools can be used to improve learning levels and make education more equitable in India.

Explaining the learning problem in India’s schools, Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, said that over 90 per cent of children at primary school-going age have actually been enrolled in schools and that over the past 10 years or so, the number of children in an age group like Class 8, for instance, has risen from eight to 10 million to about 25 million. “This means that more kids are staying in school and staying for longer. The demand for schooling and education has expanded, and that means that we have to manage both the numbers and the expectation related to schooling. That it is a magic bullet that can improve the lives of children and their families.”

When Pratham released its first Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), Ms. Banerji said that they decided to see if rising enrolments were actually corresponding to an increase in learning and capabilities. Pratham took reading and basic arithmetic as basic measures. “When we did the first survey ten years ago, people were shocked; ten years later the results continue to be shocking. The headline fact is that half the children surveyed in Class Five are not able to read at a Class Two level. In arithmetic it is a little worse.” The reality, she said, is that while India has reached near universal enrolment levels, something is still missing. Curricula are moving forward in a linear kind of way but children are routinely being left behind. Luckily, she said there were solutions to this problem and Pratham was working on getting kids at every age level to master reading and arithmetic to a level where they can propel their own education.

Rohini Nilekani spoke about EkStep, an early learning platform she and her husband, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, launched last year. EkStep wants to solve the ‘learning problem’ by creating a technology-led platform to help children improve their learning outcomes quite early in their lives. It is an open platform where content will eventually be crowdsourced, with teachers and educationists being able to add to it. “We are at a point where we can do something at a large scale using our collective imagination and build learning journeys for millions of children,” Ms. Nilekani said.

The backbone of EkStep will be an app called Genie — which will be freely available on the Android platform — which provides knowledge through stories, games and easy-to-engage-with worksheets. The platform’s data analytics will eventually let users know what content works best for early learning. Eventually Ms. Nilekani hopes EkStep will provide an ecosystem of collaboration that can be scaled up to meet the needs of 200 million children who need access to better ways of learning.

Shantanu Prakash, founder of Educomp Solutions, a company that equips schools with digital products and online solutions, said that classroom learning had to move toward a level where there is personalisation for each child. Smart classrooms, he said, have shown that problems such as poor teaching quality and rigid curriculum can be overcome but the challenge is ensuring that digital learning is properly incorporated into the fabric of the curriculum. “There are about a million digital classrooms already in schools across India but we have to look at what the outcomes are in terms of learning.” Another challenge, he said, was to keep in mind whether the skills being taught to children today were going to be relevant in a few years’ time. “If the structure of our education system is itself going to become irrelevant, then how do you innovate?” Mr. Prakash said that a key challenge is personalisation; he pointed out that a mobile phone can possibly be the biggest driver here, with kids using apps like EkStep or Educomp’s Fliplearn.

The discussion was on how innovative platforms and tools can be used to improve learning

Source | http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/more-children-are-going-to-school-but-theyre-not-really-learning/article8884461.ece

Online skill initiatives

Online skill initiatives
President Pranab Mukherjee on Friday launched a single window platform to aggregate supply and demand trends in the Indian skill development ecosystem, referred to as the National Labour Market Information System (LMIS) www.lmis.gov.in. India Skills Online (www.indiaskillsonline.com), an online platform for learning skills of choice has been launched to reach out to millions of job seekers. This has been followed with five major initiatives to assist the country’s youth.

These initiatives are Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana 2.0 and India International Skill Centres. The Labour Market Information System (LMIS) would consolidate, monitor and evaluate all skilling programs across ministries and agencies in the country. Through LMIS, the existing knowledge, systems, and technical expertise can be leveraged as much as possible, which would further avoid overlap of generated information and duplication of efforts.

Key stakeholders of the LMIS comprise trainees, training providers, industry/employers, sector skill councils, government agencies/policy makers, assessment agencies, certifying agencies, funding agencies, international agencies, labour market tracking agencies and government and private placement agencies (inclusive of employment exchanges).

LMIS brings together statistical (quantitative) and non-statistical (qualitative) information concerning labour market actors and their environment and generate key analysis and reports which can be used for various policy interventions by different government stakeholders, as well as by the industry at large. The National Skills Development Agency (NSDA) is designated as the lead agency for the development of the national LMIS. NSDA is undertaking a phase wise approach for the integration of required data.

With the introduction of Online Skill-learning environment, the whole nation potentially becomes a classroom. The audio-video graphical illustrations format will help internalize the concepts for the skill-seekers, faster and longer. Online, the hard skills are supported by soft skill learning opportunities that help candidates become more confident, presentable, professionals. Thus enabling them to become more aware, and better suited for the work environment of the day. The web skilling opportunities, come coupled with the convenience of learning and practicing the skill-nuggets with the convenience of a mobile app.

Source | http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/Hans-Classroom/2016-07-18/Online-skill-initiatives/242860

Remembering Munshi Premchand On His 136th Birth Anniversary(Upanyas Samrat)

Google has decided to mark the 136th birth anniversary of famous Hindi short story writer Munshi Premchand via a Google Doodle. The Doodle represents elements from rural India, something that was the basis for most of Premchand’s work.
“His last and most famous novel, Godaan (1936), inspired today’s doodle, which shows Premchand (sometimes referred to as “Upanyas Samrat,” or, “emperor among novelists”) bringing his signature working-class characters to life. On what would have been his 136th birthday, the illustration pays tribute to the multitude of important stories he told,” said Google about the doodle.
Munshi Premchand was the pen name of Dhanpat Rai, who was born on 31 July, 1880 at Lamhi village (Varanasi) in Uttar Pradesh. Premchand, who started writing at the ripe age of 13, has nearly 300 short stories, essays and novels to his credit. Some of his popular works include short stories such as Idgaah and Juloos, novels such as the multi-volume Mansarovar and Godaan.